Something you may have picked up on over the last, oh, seven years, is that Donald Trump is completely obsessed with Barack Obama. Unable to accept the fact that the 44th president is superior to him in every conceivable way, Trump has devoted an inordinate amount of time and energy attempting to prop himself up at his predecessor’s expense, in every category you can think of, and a lot you cannot because, well, you’ve got day jobs. Naturally, his friends have attempted to frame this as a genius marketing tactic—“For the president . . . it’s about comparison to other players,” his pal Christopher Ruddy recently toldThe Washington Post. “Who’s the guy everybody’s going to compare him to? His predecessor. He just gets that intuitively, as a business guy and a bottom-line guy.” The list of instances in which Trump has suggested he’s so much better than Obama includes but is no way limited to:

The time he said his approval rating was so much better than Obama’s one year into his presidency;

The time he said he “made more progress in the last nine months against ISIS than the Obama Administration . . . made in 8 years”;

The time he said that unlike Obama, he wouldn’t fail when it came to dealing with “Rocket Man”;

The time he said that the Conservative Political Action Conference was going to be way more “exciting” with him as president than it was while Obama was in office.

To witness the behavior is to realize that the president of the United States is one bad day away from bragging about his ability to get three women to marry him to Obama’s one. So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that in his first official economic report to Congress, released Wednesday, Trump’s pathological Obama obsession was front and center. Writing in the introduction that “expanding economic prosperity” is among society‘s most important “values and aspirations,” Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers states that “It is the view of this Council that in recent years, the pursuit of alternative-policy aspirations at the expense of growth has imposed real economic costs on the American people, in the form of diminished opportunity, security, equity, and even health.” In other words: Obama made you poor, gave you cancer, and sabotaged your chance for a new job with higher pay by using the resources of the N.S.A. to change the font on your résumé from Times New Roman to Wingdings. The council goes on to say that while the American people suffered for eight years under a president hell-bent on economic destruction, they can rest assured that Team Trump will right the ship. “We . . . endorse an agenda for returning the American economy to its full growth potential,” the intro concludes.

And in case anyone had trouble reading between the lines, Kevin Hassett, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers chair, spelled it out a bit more clearly in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, telling the paper: “The stagnation of America’s middle class in the wake of the recession is much worse than believed, and government policy under President Obama should share some of the blame. One explanation for this historical slowdown is that Obama’s tax and transfer policies worsened the wound.” (To make it seem like this isn’t yet another instance of Trump being completely and totally obsessed with Obama, Hassett noted that the report was critical of other administrations, as well, saying trade deals of the last few decades were “filled with concessions that relatively feckless negotiators of the past made to our trading partners.”)

Evidence that the president spends a good portion of his waking hours preoccupied with Obama aside, economic advisers under 44 were most annoyed by the fact that the actual data exposes the thesis that Obama destroyed economic growth as utter bullshit. “Under the previous administration, we went from the worst downturn of our lifetimes to the second longest expansion on record,” Austan Goolsbee, C.E.A. chairman from 2010 to 2011 and an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, told me. “The Trump administration inherited an unemployment rate in the 4s and thinks they hit a triple.” Alan Krueger, another Obama-era C.E.A. chairman and current Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, added: “The Trump administration . . . should do their best to maintain the economic expansion that started six months into President Obama’s first term. [They] should wake up every morning and thank President Obama for leaving the economy in good shape, without unsustainable bubbles, and with the federal deficit under control.”

Somehow, we’re guessing that’s less likely to happen than Trump is to angrily tweet “I’ve hosted so many more reality-TV shows than Obama!” one morning in the not too distant future.

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Did Paul Manafort promise a Chicago banker a White House job in exchange for home loans?

Manafort received three separate loans in December 2016 and January 2017 [totaling $16 million] from Federal Savings Bank for homes in New York City, Virginia, and the Hamptons.

The banker, Stephen Calk, president of the Federal Savings Bank, was announced as a member of candidate Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers in August 2016.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is now investigating whether there was a quid pro quo agreement between Manafort and Calk. Manafort left the Trump campaign in August 2016 after the millions he had earned working for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine drew media scrutiny. Calk did not receive a job in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

According to sources who spoke to NBC News, the loans were “questioned by other officials at the bank,” and at least one bank employee who “felt pressured into approving the deals” is cooperating with Mueller’s team. Neither Calk, the P.R. firm that represents the bank, nor the White House responded to NBC’s requests for comment. Jason Maloni, Manafort’s spokesman, referred to his prior statements that Manafort’s loans were “over-collateralized and above-market rate,” which strikes us as a bit like saying If he was giving out White House jobs for loans, he would’ve demanded much better terms than this.

Shares of Amazon hit $1500 for the first time today and that's made Jeff Bezos a cool $2.5 billion.

His total net worth is now just above $123 billion, which is suddenly dwarfing Bill Gates at $91.8 [billion] and Warren Buffett at $87.2 billion.

Donald Trump Jr. can’t wait to bust out of the shackles of his dad’s boring job

Speaking to an Indian television network on Tuesday, Trump’s eldest son, who in the same interview lamented not getting any credit for all the sacrifices he’s had to make, said that, “[A] few years ago, I said [India] would become our largest [market] because I really believed in the market . . . I think it will continue to be the same when I am able to get back in the market and focus on the business side, on new deals again in the future, once my father is out of office.” Incidentally, the purpose of Don Jr.’s current trip is to pitch expensive condos, which falls pretty firmly on the business side!